Writin' The River

​Well, let me say that I liked this film; I thought it a proper western. I’d heard some foul reviews from friends who thought it didn’t make the cut (pardon the pun), but in the end I thought it a well-done film that satisfied all the western genre expectations and also introduced a new twist.

Bone Tomahawk has been widely labeled a “horror/western,” and I understand the impulse to do so; like its brethren Ravenous and Cowboys and Aliens, it does cross genre boundaries a bit, although in the end, I think the horrific aspect of a cannibalistic tribe tucked away in the mountains stays much closer to the traditional genre boundaries than either of the earlier films do.

To address the complaints of some of my friends, who said there was one scene in particular that lost them; yes, I know which scene you mean, and I too found it gratuitous and, more importantly, pointless. Once Deputy Nick is taken from his cell, viewers know exactly what will become of him, and seeing the violent end to this character on center stage does little to forward the plot or even heighten tension. I feel it would actually have been more effective to have the tortuous action occur offscreen, allowing viewers’ imaginations to fill in the blanks. However, it is also a brief scene, and I think the rest of the film is effective enough to give it a pass.

Back to its assets. One thing I think the film does really well is that by setting the antagonists as a mysterious “tribe” who are shunned and feared even by the local native tribes, the film is able to cast an “Other” as the enemy without complicating our contemporary attitudes toward westward expansion and the subjugation of native tribes. There is a small but effective scene in which a native character (played by Longmire’s Zahn McClarnon) advises the posse not to go, saying that his tribe avoids this canyon because they’re so dangerous. This effectively establishes that the tribe is not Indian, and heightens their otherworldy aspect.

Had this film been made in the 50s or 60s, it would have been easy enough to make the bad guys “Indians” and be done with it, and no one would have questioned the choice. But westerns have evolved with our national consciousness, and we no longer uncritically accept Native Americans as the natural antagonist, even in a western. So Bone Tomahawk is able to deftly recast the Other as an unnatural tribe of flesh eaters, maintaining the dichotomy of hero and villain without creating the cognitive dissonance of imperialism or conquest that older westerns may have to a younger generation.

Finally, this film (unlike the Hateful Eight), reifies an old genre staple and provides something close to a happy ending – well, happy for at least a couple of characters, anyway. I won’t spoil it further, but the film concludes on a fairly positive note, giving viewers a satisfying resolution. The film is gritty and even brutal, to be sure, but in the end it reifies the social construct that was disrupted by the antagonists, and finally privileges the values of heroism, loyalty, and ultimately the power of love.

​Wow. I just thought this film was spectacular, and so well done that I almost hesitate to blog anything about it. But of course, I can’t resist, and so on I go.

Much has been written about this film, the manner of its production, and its relationship to the true biography of Hugh Glass, mountain man extraordinaire. No film, I suspect, could capture the epic nature of the real life of Hugh Glass, but this film makes the attempt, and I think it comes close.

You should go see this film. Today. That’s my review. Oh, and there is a pretty cool scene late in the film which involves hand-to-hand combat with a knife and a tomahawk – I think any film featuring tomahawk combat is worth your ticket price, but maybe that’s my own bias. ;-)

Two things about this film make me want to blog about it, in spite of the internet having pretty much said all there is to say about this film already. The first is the tremendous cinematography; the visual shots in this film are just stellar, and one example is the use of trees. Early in the film, viewers get a flashback voice-over of Glass’ dead wife saying that if you stand near a tree in the middle of a storm and look at its branches, the tree looks as though it’s coming down for sure. But if you look at the trunk, you see its stability and rootedness, and you can understand how it’s able to withstand the storm. Cool. Once viewers have gotten this little insight, we are inundated with brief and subtle shots of trees, mostly from Glass’ perspective below them, and we are almost subconsciously reminded of the quote from the beginning of the film, and asked to think about the storm that is Glass’ life throughout much of the film.

The second thing that really struck me is the sheer number of visual scenes featuring a birth or rebirth. The name “revenant” means a spirit coming from another world, or a spirit returning from the dead, and Glass’ character lives up to his title. We see Glass get mauled by a humongous bear, of course, but even as he follows his trail for vengeance there is a plethora of images centering on rebirth and renewal: he digs himself out of his own grave; he is left in a makeshift sweat lodge and must force his way out; he seeks shelter inside of a horse and must break his way free, and on and on. At each point he is either near death or he should be, and his breaking out of the encumbrances represents a rebirth as if he were passing through a portal from another world.

The symbolism of this cinematography, combined with the inspiring tale of survival that is Glass’ biography made me think about the lessons from this film. Few of us will have the sort of experiences that tested Hugh Glass; indeed, even within his own tumultuous time period he was an astounding anomaly. But each of us, if we are lucky to live so long, move through periods of growth, decay and personal rebirth, and I think this film reminds us that when all seems darkest, we must simply push through to find the new dawn. And we must breathe, keep breathing, for as long as we keep breathing, we will stay alive and see a new day.

Over the holidays I went to the theater; I don’t often go to the real theater since the advent of Netflix and DVR, but some things are still worth seeing on the big screen, and almost anything from Quentin Tarantino is a sure bet to be a visual extravaganza. I was not disappointed. Okay, I didn’t hate it; I was trying to be clever in my title and get you to read this, but I do have some bones of contention (stay tuned for my forthcoming review of Bone Tomahawk).

To be brief: I really liked the film, BUT I don’t know if I loved it - or liked it enough to own it on DVD/blu ray/whatever comes out next. I don’t think I’d pay theater prices a second time, either, but that has as much to do with my middle-aged stay-homeness and the rich tapestry of the current crop of movies as with my opinion of this film.

The Hateful Eight is Tarantino’s eighth movie, according to its introduction. I looked it up on IMdB and counted at least ten films that were exclusively his, as opposed to his writing credits, or directing television shows or the like, so I think he’s playing with viewers here. I think that’s fair. It’s visually stunning, with brilliant cinematography and a great use of setting to set the stage for his story.

Tarantino does a solid job in the western genre, which almost pleads for a subtle combination of traditional storytelling and groundbreaking genre-bending. Tarantino stays close to the traditional mores here, and the cast and writing is first-rate. Because he’s Tarantino, you know it’s going to be a very graphic movie, and it does not disappoint. In fact, his graphic depictions of violence are not even new to the genre, and not because this is his second western (Django Unchained having come out two years prior) – Sam Peckinpah was shocking viewers with gritty violence back in the 1970s, and his was more realistic.

It is, however, Tarantino’s unrepentant penchant for graphic – I do mean graphic – violence that finally undoes the film for me in many ways. His violence is gratiuitous and unrealistic*, and it ends up feeling like a Technicolor yawn rather than story-motivated violence. This is the problem: when Tarantino, who has clearly restrained himself for much of the film, finally lets himself loose, the tightly-woven story he was telling virtually disappears into a melee of Tarantino … well, being Tarantino. He gets in his own way in telling the story, for me, and I am jarred out of the suspension of disbelief and immediately I’m not worried about a character being shot, or hanged, or disemboweled … I’m suddenly no longer in his fictive world, but am once again sitting in a theater and thinking (perhaps with shock and dismay) at how graphic this film is.

Spoiler Alert

One other thing, as long as I’m grousing. The other point about the film that bothered me is that everyone dies, and frankly, I’m not okay with that. I understand that there are philosophical and narrative theories that can account for this, with omniscient third-person narrators and what-not, but I can’t shake my old university fiction professor’s admonition that if a writer kills off ALL his characters, the question remains unanswered about who lived to tell the tale? This is not a small question, and creates a lingering problem for some viewers – like myself. I concede that it’s not an insurmountable problem, and in our post-postmodern world viewers are likely unfazed by such a narrative wrinkle. Perhaps my problem is that I’m essentially old-fashioned, and I want to see someone – almost anyone - make it out of this chaotic mess alive. I want a good old-fashioned (see?) hero to rise above the violence and establish the moral certainty that grit can see you through. But Tarantino doesn’t play that game, and maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

*I’m not normally dissuaded by graphic violence, but Tarantino’s use of blood and exploding heads is cartoonish, almost Monte Python-esque. This is almost a signature style of his, but it worked in the Kill Bill series precisely because those movies were an homage to a B-film martial arts genre in which this approach was a better fit.